Inside the Star

China’s child-fuelled medal machine keeps cranking out Olympic gold

In China, athletes as young as 5 endure brutal training knowing that the glory of the state trumps all. For the young children caught up inside the country's medal machine, it can be anything but fun and games.

A young girl practises gymnastic movements at Chengdu Children's Gymnastics School. There are around 3,000 sports schools in China, recruiting thousands of very young children and sending the elites to the country's Olympic machine.

The only thing that matched the awesome speed of Chinese swimming star Ye Shiwen’s bullet-like finish in the women’s 400-metre individual medley last Saturday was the speed with which suspicion followed.

Had the Chinese taken a page from the old, drug-tinged East German playbook?

Was the 16-year-old swimmer on steroids?

Had Chinese trainers finally found a way around the International Olympic Committee’s anti-doping tests?

Ye was plucked from a kindergarten class at the age of 6 in 2002 and has spent the last 10 years of her life in gruelling training sessions, in a system Britain’s four-time Olympic gold medallist Matthew Pinsent has likened to child abuse.

In 2005, Pinsent toured Shi Cha Hai, one of Beijing’s most elite sports schools, and found evidence of beating — confirmed to him by the school’s vice-principal.

The official said that while it was not official school policy to beat aspiring young athletes, there was an old Chinese proverb: “Without beating, without success.”

“It was a pretty disturbing experience,” Pinsent told reporters at the time. “I know it is gymnastics and that sport in particular has to start their athletes young ... but I was really shocked by what went on.”

He said he could accept that western and eastern approaches to training might be different.

“At the end of the day,” he added, “I definitely think those kids were being abused.”

When he observed one young boy with marks across his back, he said, the child confirmed that he had been beaten. Others offered similar stories.

Pinsent saw one 7-year-old girl weeping as she was repeatedly made to do handstands.

Human Rights Watch worries that training practices that ignore or violate the rights of children, enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, are more likely in a system overseen by an authoritarian government like China’s.

But the rigorous, sometime heavy-handed treatment inside China’s immense medal factory — a state system structured, planned and funded by China’s bureaucracy — is no secret inside China.

Writing in Wednesday’s state-run Global Times, columnist Lian Peng called the state’s training of its young athletes “not natural,” and he criticized it for bringing “great harm to children’s bodies.”

Readers agreed.

“There’s no denying that such extreme, high-intensity training is harmful to one’s health,” wrote one. “Chinese gymnastics training can devastate the body of a child,” another opined.

But the overarching aim of achieving greater glory for the state and the Communist Party of China trumps all.

It’s so important that in Vancouver in 2010, then-18-year-old Olympic speedskater Zhou Yang was publicly criticized for daring to thank her parents before the state when she won gold.

Her filial affection triggered a storm of criticism. Yu Zaiqing, deputy director of the National Sports Bureau, even called Zhou’s patriotism into doubt.

“It’s fine to thank your mom and dad, but you should still thank your country first and foremost,” he told the state legislature.

Xu Guoqi, a Hong Kong history professor and author of a book on China’s Olympic dream, emphasizes that the entire aim of the medal-focused system is rooted in “winning glory for the nation.”

“Given the close link between sports, national fate and honour, it was a natural step for the Chinese to mobilize all its national resources to win medals,” Xu told news site Caixin Online.

There are more than 3,000 sport schools across China instructing 400,000 athletes. The best — about 46,000 — make it to the nation’s elite sports centres, such as Shi Cha Hai in Beijing.

Of those 46,000, fewer than 400 will make the Olympic team.

Training can start at a tender age, in some cases as young as 5. It can consume most of the aspiring athletes’ waking hours — with a few devoted to education.

If success is measured only in medals, the system works. At the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics, China took home a record-breaking 51 medals, and 100 overall.

But for the participants caught up inside the machine, it can be anything but fun and games. Selflessness in the service of the state still appears to prevail.

Author Xu says the system “takes away from individual joy in sports.”

Chinese diver Wu Minxia may have felt that on Wednesday.

After she won her third Olympic gold medal, her family revealed a devastating secret they had kept for years, news reports said. Wu’s parents had decided not to tell her that her grandparents died and that her mother was battling breast cancer until after she won the 3-metre springboard in London.

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